One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture

The opening chapter of Part 1 introduces Ryan Roth, who is vice president of Roth Farms, a conventional vegetable and sugarcane farm located in Belle Glade, Florida, which is part of the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). Even though the farm is large (around 3,500 acres) and employs 130 people, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers it a family farm, where one family owns the majority of the farm’s business. Roth Farms, like other large-scale and midsize family farms, operates akin to a corporation. His family members hold positions similar to a corporation’s board.

In contrast to Anderson’s childhood, the farm was not a large part of Ryan’s youth because the farm was located some distance from his home. He began to visit the farm more as he grew older, although it was not until college that he decided he wanted to run the farm. Anderson asks Ryan whether he describes himself as a farmer, manager of a farm, or owner of a company. While Ryan notes that he loves “growing the crop now” (12), he does not directly answer Anderson’s question. Anderson believes it is more accurate to say that Ryan “loves the job of managing employees, field rotations, machinery repair, and spray schedules required to grow the crop” (13), since he is not actually the one in the field doing the physical labor.

This chapter addresses how modern conventional farming became “farmerless” (15). While pre-1900 American farms focused on “extraction rather than preservation” of the land (15), they followed the “whole-farm approach” (15). These early farms were diverse, meaning numerous plants and animals lived on the farmland. Symbiotic relationships between these species contributed to the soil’s health. Farmers sold their products in local markets, feeding both their own families and their local communities. They were also self-reliant, saving seeds for future crops, using fertilizer produced by their own animals, controlling weeds and pests through crop rotation and diversification, and relying on oxen and horses to assist with manual labor. Finally, the sun rather than oil served as the farm’s primary source of power.

Beginning in the 1900s, globalization created new kinds of farms. To stay in business, farms began to specialize in certain crops and animals. However, specialization had negative consequences, including reducing a farm’s resilience, making farmers and ranchers more vulnerable to financial troubles; destroying the symbiotic relationships that existed under the “whole-farm approach”; forcing farmers and their families to rely on off-farm businesses, including grocery stores and livestock feed suppliers; shifting reliance from animal and solar power to diesel power; and increasing usage of pesticides and insecticides to control weeds and pests. These conditions led to agriculture becoming a large-scale business operation, also known as agribusiness.

Earl Butz, US Secretary of agriculture in the 1970s, further shaped agricultural production in the US with his edict: “Get big or get out” (19). His tenure forced the expansion of farms across the country, and those that failed to get bigger “deserved to fail” (19). Anderson notes that farmers and ranchers, including her own grandfather Marlo, responded with vigor to Butz’s edict. However, the “Get big or get out” edict led to a farm crisis with midsize farmers and ranchers going bankrupt. As a result, the US agribusiness system is extremely top-heavy and only focuses on increasing output. The industrial model is “blind” (24) to the harm it is causing to farm families, natural resources, rural communities, and human health.

Roth Farms followed the edict “get big or get out.” Because of its location in the EAA, the Roth family had no choice but to expand the farm or be bought out by sugar corporations like US Sugar and Florida Crystals. The Roth family expanded the farm by adding turfgrass, which requires substantial amounts of water and frequent mowing. While sod is profitable, it also strips away the extremely fertile soil known as muck. Roth Farms eventually stopped growing sod due to the sod market’s collapse during the 2008-2009 recession. Anderson notes that “getting out of sod wasn’t a matter of simply planting something else; it meant fundamentally changing the farm’s business model” (26).

Roth Farms also constructed a commercial produce packinghouse in 2005, which represents the most significant “get big or get out” move. By owning a packinghouse, Roth Farms hoped to bring in large profits by removing the middleman between the farm and the grocery store. To build the packinghouse, the Roth family borrowed heavily. During the 2008-2009 recession, their main revenue, which was sod grass, dried up, leaving the family with $11 million in debt, largely from the construction of the packinghouse. The Roths refused to sell the packinghouse and instead sold-off land. Ryan notes, “Looking back on it, I wish we hadn’t built it. We had a really good farm that we had to sell in order to keep it afloat. A two-hundred-acre farm, probably the best farmland we had, we had to sell” (30). To Anderson, Ryan’s testament further illustrates how good people are trapped in a bad agricultural system. To try and increase profits, the Roth family built a packinghouse. Yet the packinghouse is what nearly destroyed their farm and livelihood.

Chapter 4 illustrates how industrial farming has negatively impacted the wellbeing of farming families. In Belle Glade, Florida, mega sugar corporations, known as “Big Sugar” (37), bought the region’s small- and mid-size vegetable farms. These buyouts cut the number of agricultural jobs and drove away businesses that depended on farming families. As a result, farming families with means are leaving Belle Glade, resulting in the community shrinking and becoming more destitute. Belle Glade is not a unique story, but one that is happening to rural communities across the country.

Farmworkers are also some of the nation’s lowest paid laborers, with only dishwashers earning less money. Most farmworkers have no benefits, are paid minimum wage, and live below the poverty line. Because of these factors alongside the grueling labor, most Americans do not take farm jobs. These jobs are instead held by undocumented immigrants or impoverished migrants on work visas. Many of these individuals live in appalling conditions and have to rely on soup kitchens and food pantries because they cannot afford food. They also cannot visit their families easily, even for funerals, because getting back into the US is so challenging. Fatality rates and pesticide-related illnesses are also high among farmworkers.

Anderson uses the disappearance of muck soil, an extremely fertile soil type, in the EAA to demonstrate how conventional farmers take more from the land than they return. While driving across Roth Farms, she sees “white and gray rocks scattered in the soil” (45). Ryan explains how the disappearance of muck soil, a process known as subsidence, on the farm exposes the bedrock, which is the source of the rocks. As the muck soil disappears, it loses nutrients and requires more fertilizer each year. For example, Ryan’s farm now adds liquid nitrogen fertilizer to cabbage because the soil is nitrogen deficient.

Ryan argues that EAA farmers are employing best management practices (BMPs) to make the muck last. These practices include “maintaining a higher water table by pumping less water from fields, incorporating rice and sugarcane into crop rotations (these crops tolerate flooded conditions, which helps slow subsidence), and tilling less often” (47). While these strategies have slowed the muck’s subsidence, it will still disappear completely in the next several decades under conventional farming strategies. Despite this reality, many EAA farmers continue to conventionally grow crops. These farmers are stuck in a bad production model, but Anderson ends this chapter noting that it does not have to be this way.